Thursday, March 27, 2008

New Look for the Palette

Way back in March 2006, the visual design team at IBM started working on a new UI for the palette. Well it has taken a while and some refresh to the design, but the Eclipse modeling team at IBM has finally implemented a new palette.

A shot of the Palette view for the GMF logic example:
The new palette includes:
  • New color treatment for drawers: Closed, expanded and hover.
  • New color treatment for groups and tools: white background, mouse hover and selected.
  • New color treatment for stacks: white background, mouse hover and selected.
  • New Pin in and Pin out icons.
  • New Palette icon.
  • New dock and expanded look.
  • Drawer icon optional.
  • Toolbar group (the top tool group above is in icon mode: selection tool, zoom in, zoom out, notes stack).
  • A completely new look for stack, including flyouts and pinned stack (above shows the Rectangle Types stack pinned).
Cherie has already committed most of her work and is finishing up the stack work for GEF 3.4 M6.

Best part of the new palette is that there are no API changes, all GEF (and GMF) clients get a new modern look for free.

Feel free to bang away and raise any Bugzillas on us if you find any issues.

11 comments:

Tom said...

Well but if I don't want to use GEF I can use it. Does it have any dependency on GEF-Internal code or could it be moved to e.g. Nebula and consumed as a seperate control?

Mariot Chauvin said...

Cleary beautiful now, and that comes with no API change :).
Great work !

Ed Merks said...

Very pretty! Great collaboration with the graphic designers!

Anthony Hunter said...

Hi Tom, unfortunately, this is indeed GEF dependent code.

Ugo Sangiorgi said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ugo Sangiorgi said...

Hi Anthony, i have an issue that is not related to the palette itself, but with the GEF cursor ( see this link )
Would that be a case to file a bug?
I tried to start a discussion on gmf lists, but no response so far.
Thank you, great work!

mini said...

Hi . I am trying to change the white background to a different colour in the palette but does not seem to happen.
Is it possible to change this colour.How could i achieve this.

mini said...

Hi . I am trying to change the white background to a different colour in the palette but does not seem to happen.
Is it possible to change this colour.How could i achieve this.

Unknown said...

Hi Antony, I am trying to change the palette to a tree structure. What is the right way to go about it?

Beschi Antony Dominic said...

Hi I have a doubt, How to make Group & Sub Group of Tools in Palette?

For Example

CRUD Tools
Add Tools
Tool1
Tool2
.....
Read Tools
Tool1
.....
...........

How can i implement this, using GEF?

Beschi Antony Dominic said...

Hi, is there any option to add search option to Palette, so that i can just type in search box and find the item in palette, it will be very useful when there are many tools in eclipse gef palette.